Kip Thorne Quotes

#1. When gravitational waves reach the earth, the waves stretch and squeeze space. This is a tiny stretch and squeeze. Far too small to detect with ordinary human senses.

Kip Thorne

#2. singularities, he asserted, "are a place in which the fiery marriage of Einstein's relativistic laws with the quantum laws is consummated.

Kip S. Thorne

#3. The French translation of 'a black hole has no hair' is so obscene that French publishers resisted it vigorously, to no avail.

Kip S. Thorne

#4. We have to have a combination of general relativity that describes the warping of space and time, and quantum physics, which describes the uncertainties in that warping and how they change.

Kip Thorne

#5. In 2014, the Earth's gravity is weakest in southern India (blue spot) and strongest in Iceland and Indonesia (red spots).

Kip S. Thorne

#6. We're going to need a definitive quantum theory of gravity, which is part of a grand unified theory - it's the main missing piece.

Kip Thorne

#7. The resulting, stable singularities now carry the name BKL in honor of Belinsky, Khalatnikov, and Lifshitz. A BKL singularity is chaotic. Highly chaotic. And lethal. Highly lethal.

Kip S. Thorne

#8. Some segments of this book may be rough going. That's the nature of real science. It requires thought. Sometimes deep thought. But thinking can be rewarding. You can just skip the rough parts, or you can struggle to understand.

Kip S. Thorne

#9. I do hope that 'Interstellar' and this kind of science in film will catch the public fancy and help to reignite an interest in science - and a respect for the power of science in dealing with the problems that society has to deal with.

Kip Thorne

#10. How could human civilization decline so far, yet seem so normal in many respects? And is it scientifically possible that a blight could wipe out all edible

Kip S. Thorne

#11. The environment near Gargantua will become more dangerous for individual life forms, including humans, promoting faster evolution if enough individuals survive.

Kip S. Thorne

#12. The human race has a yearning to explore. That's part of our biological and psychological makeup.

Kip Thorne

#13. We humans are confined to our brane.

Kip S. Thorne

#14. No matter how hard we may try, we can only travel forward. The relativistic laws guarantee it.

Kip S. Thorne

#15. Everything is drawn inexorably toward the future.

Kip S. Thorne

#16. Gravitational waves will bring us exquisitely accurate maps of black holes - maps of their space-time. Those maps will make it crystal clear whether or not what we're dealing with are black holes as described by general relativity.

Kip Thorne

#17. If you have a wormhole, then you can turn them into time machines for going backward in time.

Kip Thorne

#18. If you go down through the horizon of a black hole, at the center you don't find a tunnel that leads you to some other place in the universe.

Kip Thorne

#19. The first planet that Cooper and his crew visit is Miller's. The most impressive things about this planet are the extreme slowing of time there, gigantic water waves, and huge tidal gravity. All three are related, and arise from the planet's closeness to Gargantua.

Kip S. Thorne

#20. The fastest that human spacecraft are likely to achieve in the twenty-first century, I think, is 300 kilometres per second.

Kip S. Thorne

#21. 'Closed timelike curve' is the jargon for time travel. It means you go out, come back and meet yourself in the past.

Kip Thorne

#22. I have used movies to go to sleep at night. You flip from channel to channel to channel and see just enough to make your brain mushy and go to sleep.

Kip Thorne

#23. Yes, that's what I meant to say. If this seems a bit circular to you, well, it is, but it has deep meaning.

Kip S. Thorne

#24. It was quite a surprise when I realized that with a single wormhole you could have time hook up towards the future or towards the past and that you can actually manipulate the wormhole and change how time hooked up.

Kip Thorne

#25. Whether you can go back in time is held in the grip of the law of quantum gravity.

Kip Thorne

#26. We see no objects in our universe that could become wormholes as they age.

Kip Thorne

#27. Our universe - it's three-dimensional, but we can pretend it's two-dimensional so it's like this sheet of paper - and we live in Pasadena over here and London is over there, and it's thousands of miles from Pasadena to London.

Kip Thorne

#28. The right answer is seldom as important as the right question.

Kip Thorne

#29. I became interested in this question of whether you can build wormholes for interstellar travel. I realized that if you had a wormhole, the theory of general relativity by itself would permit you to go backward in time.

Kip Thorne

#30. Can you identify in your own life speculations that became educated guesses and then truth? Have you ever seen your established truths upended, with a resulting revolution in your life?

Kip S. Thorne

#31. Everything likes to live where it will age the most slowly, and gravity pulls it there.

Kip S. Thorne

#32. As early as I can remember, I wanted to be a snowplow driver. When you grow up in the Rocky Mountains, like I did, you see the snow drifts piled up six feet high, and you're two feet, so it's impressive.

Kip Thorne

#33. An explosion in space makes no sound, as there is no air to transmit the sound waves.

Kip S. Thorne

#34. If you have somebody who's brilliant and highly creative with a different point of view than you have, and a very different intellectual background, great things can happen.

Kip Thorne

#35. Sending people into space is very important culturally. That's really the justification. You cannot rationally justify it on the basis of the science and technology we get out of it.

Kip Thorne

#36. A big misconception is that a black hole is made of matter that has just been compacted to a very small size. That's not true. A black hole is made from warped space and time.

Kip Thorne

#37. Each black hole spins on its axis like the Earth spins. That spin creates two vortexes of twisting space, somewhat like vortexes in a bathtub or a whirlpool.

Kip Thorne

#38. A black hole really is an object with very rich structure, just like Earth has a rich structure of mountains, valleys, oceans, and so forth. Its warped space whirls around the central singularity like air in a tornado.

Kip Thorne

#39. Warping begets warping in a nonlinear, self-bootstrapping manner. This is a fundamental feature of Einstein's relativistic laws, and so different from everyday experience. It's somewhat like a hypothetical science-fiction character who goes backward in time and gives birth to herself.

Kip S. Thorne